Sectoral, resource and carbon impacts of increased paper and cardboard recycling

Recycling is emerging as an alternative to extraction in many industries and one of the corner stones of the circular economy. In this paper, we assess the role of paper and cardboard recycling on the forest sector, both from an economic and carbon perspective. For that purpose, we model this recycling industry within our forest sec- tor model, in order to relate it to other wood products. As the forest sector has an important potential for climate change mitigation, this model allows us to assess the effects on the resource and the carbon balance of the forest sector. We show that these results are strongly linked to the hypothesis of substitution or complementarity between recycled and wood-pulp.